Historiography of the American Revolution
Beginning in the early 17th century and over one hundred years after the accidental discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, colonists in the form of investors, laborers, slaves, indentured servants, merchants, and pious followers of Christ emigrated from England to the Atlantic seaboard in order to find a new way in the New World. The settlement known as Jamestown, located on the Powhatan River in the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia, was the first permanent establishment in America by the English. On April 10, 1606, King James I granted the Virginia Company of London in the First Virginia Charter the right to govern and lead its own colony. Because King James I was the grantor of the charter, he was delegating his authority as the monarch of England to the Virginia Company. In 1620, the Pilgrims, led by William Bradford, arrived in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, in order to find a place in the world to practice religious freedom.
While the colonists in Jamestown and Plymouth came to the New World from different locations in England (some via the Netherlands), and for different reasons, these immigrants lived, worked, and existed an entire ocean away from the other English citizens for over a century. Understandably over this period and while the colonists in America viewed themselves as distinctly English and maintained the English inheritance of the rights of fellow Englishmen, the populations on different sides of the pond evolved into two distinct groups – the British and the American English. By 1775, the differences came to a head, and in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, the colonists, finding that the British had “been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity” (to quote the Declaration of Independence) sought a complete separation from the monarchy of England and to hold the British as “the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” At the conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783 and with the colonists successfully defeating the British at Yorktown with the help of the French navy, the colonists went on to create the United States of America, and almost immediately, the debate related to the history and meaning of the American Revolution began. Since the conclusion of the American Revolution, historians have debated the historical meaning and historical significance of the Revolutionary period. The historiography of the American Revolution is important to historians for the purpose of achieving a broader understanding of early American history.
Historiographers of the American Revolution
In its most basic terms, historiography is the history of historical writing. In more descriptive terms, historiography is the noting of the changes of historical interpretation over time. From the fall of Rome to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the history of the early American period, the historical interpretation of these events or periods tend to evolve over time. Not only is it important to understand the facts and the history, but it is also important to study the historian in order to more clearly understand the historian’s perspective. As far as the American Revolution is concerned, the first history writers lived through the war and wrote nearly contemporaneously. Among these first historians of the American Revolution are David Ramsay and Mercy Otis Warren. Ramsay, who was a delegate to the Continental Congress and a prisoner of war, wrote multiple books on the American Revolution including The History of the American Revolution (1789). Mercy Otis Warren, a remarkable female author at the turn of the 19th century and friend of many of the founding fathers, wrote History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (1805). Both Ramsay and Warren were colonists who supported the American Revolution and understood the American Revolution as a battle between the righteous and virtuous colonists against the imperialistic and an overbearing British monarch.
Christopher Hill, a premier English historian and professor from Oxford University, in his book, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (1993), summarizes the period of 1603-1714 as “England’s Century of Revolution.” From the beginning of the 13th century until the end of England’s Century of Revolution, England produced its “constitutional arrangements” by way of a long history of documents. Included therein are analyses of Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights of 1628, and the English Bill of Rights of 1689, but other lesser influential documents include the Provisions of Oxford of 1258, the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, the Act of Settlement of 1701, and the Acts of Union of 1707 (Source: Robert Blackburn, “Magna Carta and the Development of the British Constitution).
The English colonists considered themselves English subjects and entitled to the same rights as any other subject. After the Seven Years’ War and the advent of direct taxation upon the English colonies by Parliament without the requisite representation in Parliament and the eventual quartering of standing British armies in the colonies, among other grievances, the English colonists petitioned Parliament and King George III for redress. These petitions by the colonists being denied, in practical effect, clearly demonstrated to the English colonists that neither Parliament nor the king viewed that the English colonists possessed the rights of the English people. As a consequence of such denial of rights, the American Revolution ensued. Even though the colonists sought independence from England, they still maintained the English ideas of rights. As posited by Ramsay and Warren, it was these very English ideas of rights that precipitated the American Revolution.
While Ramsay and Warren provide the contemporary colonial version of the American Revolution, the British loyalists had their own opinion on the matter. Thomas Hutchinson, in his The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774 Comprising a Detailed Narrative of the Origin and Early Stages of the American Revolution (1828), argued that the American Revolution was caused by the poor political calculations of Parliament. Hutchinson, who was born in Boston, was the former British governor of Massachusetts, and whose house was nearly destroyed by a Boston mob in 1765 (Bernard Bailyn wrote about the ordeal), believed in the values and ideas of the rebelling colonists; however, he struggled with the idea of complete independence from the Crown and was critical of the Declaration of Independence. That said, Hutchinson was at the center of the beginning of the American Revolution. As the governor of Massachusetts in the years preceding the American Revolution and his advocacy for the supremacy of Parliament, it is clear that Hutchinson, like Ramsay and Warren, held partisan political positions related to the Revolution.
Republican Ideology as the Driver of the Revolution
In his article “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” published in the American Historical Review, Bernard Bailyn explains the state of modern historiography in 1982 related to the early American period. According to Bailyn, the story of the early American period was initially dominated by the Whig interpretation which focused on the effects of Enlightenment ideology on the populace and the founding fathers. Such interpretation is highlighted by George Bancroft and Edmund S. Morgan. George Bancroft was a 19th century historian who graduated from Harvard College and studied and taught all over the world. In Bancroft’s book, History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent (1856), he argued that the significance of the American Revolution was one of Providence and that America was on a providential path of progress to a better republican society. Years later, Bancroft was joined by Edmund S. Morgan. In his books, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1995) and The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956), both written in the 1950s, Morgan argued that, contrary to the progressive/economic historiography (discussed infra, which posits that the republican rhetoric of the colonists was mere rhetoric to which the colonists did not truly adhere), the American Revolution was ideologically driven by men who truly believed in liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To Morgan and Bancroft, republican ideology was a primary driver of the American Revolution.
Later and according to Bailyn, in the early 20th century and through the influence of the philosophy of Karl Marx, historians, such as Charles A. Beard came to prevalence. Beard studied at Oxford University, where he completed his doctorate, and taught at Columbia University. In his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (2017), Beard analyzed the early American period and the American Revolution through the filter of Marxism and the struggle between the working class and the propertied classes holding that the rhetoric around liberty was meaningless. Such a Marxist interpretation of the American Revolution fell out of favor during the Cold War. In the 1980s, Forrest McDonald, a history professor from the University of Alabama, directly refuted Beard’s assessment. In his books, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (1984) and We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958), McDonald took direct aim at Beard and asserted the traditional view that the founding fathers were an intellectually driven group mining classical Enlightenment thought and political history in furtherance of a free nation. McDonald concludes that, contrary to the Marxist historiography, the founders knew that they were taking a risk by creating a completely new form of government based upon ancient history and western political theory.
On the other hand, and also opposed to Beard’s interpretation, Bailyn interpreted the early American period from a perspective that the rhetoric of liberty during this era was central to the movement and not simply propaganda. Bailyn, in his book Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1992), held that the ideology of entrepreneurism dominated the early American period. Bailyn argued that, from the moment that the colonists reached the New World, the colonists and the British were on different cultural paths. Bailyn concluded that the struggles of the colonists in the New World gave them a different perspective than the British going into the American Revolution, one of revitalization of the republican ideology.
In a similar vein as Bailyn, a recent member of Parliament, Daniel Hannan, in his book Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World (2013), argues that the American Revolution was a continuation of the generational march towards freedom and liberty. Hannan adds both the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence to the list of documents which encompass the western legacy of freedom and liberty. In same vein as Hannan, Edmund Burke once stated in his “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly of France” in 1791 as follows:
Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without…men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Later, a student of Bailyn at Harvard University, Gordon S. Wood, who is a history professor at Brown University and won a Pulitzer Prize in History for his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution (2011), argued that the American Revolution defined America. As argued by Wood, the “Revolution was integral to the societal, political, and cultural changes at the end of the 18th century and made possible the anti-slavery and pro-women’s rights movements in later years.” Contrary to the historiographical idea that the American Revolution and the founding were conservative in nature, Wood holds that the American Revolution was more radical in its time than anything that had preceded it. Wood concluded that Republicanism was historically not just a political system but a way of life – a life of liberty and that “Republicanism as a set of values and a form of life was much too pervasive, comprehensive, and involved with being liberal and enlightened to be seen as subversive or as anti-monarchical.”
Historiography Shows That Not All Historical Interpretations are Good
In conclusion, there are vast numbers of interpretations related to the American Revolution, and presently many historians are researching and writing about the different social conditions during the American Revolution and are producing some good history related to black slaves and women of the time which are rounding out the historiography. That said, not all of this present history is good and scholarly. In his article, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” supra, Bailyn asserts that there is overwhelming historiography of the early American period including geographers, economists, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists, but some of the historiography lacks coherence. Recently, a book related to the early American period as well as the remainder of the history of the United States called “The 1619 Project – A New Origin Story” was introduced to the meaning of the American Revolution by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times (2021). Hannah-Jones received her bachelor’s degree in history and African American studies from Notre Dame and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina. Hannah-Jones is now a journalism teacher at Howard University. As alluded to above, John Smyth organized over 100 individuals to go to Jamestown in 1619, and within 15 years there were only 19 left. That said, Hannah-Jones focuses not on John Smyth in Jamestown in 1619 but on the arrival of 20 enslaved men in the same year and argues that the only way to view the history of America is through the story of the enslavement of African Americans and that the Revolution was fought to maintain slavery as an institution, and this conclusion is highly contested by nearly all historians of the period. That said, and despite winning a Pulitzer Prize for the book, Hannah-Jones is not a professional historian, and the project is considered by many historians, including Gordon S. Wood, as journalism with false facts and by others simply as “junk history.”
Sources
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Bailyn, Bernard. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974.
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Beard, Charles A. and Louis Filler. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2017.
Blackburn, Robert. “Magna Carta and the Development of the British Constitution.” Historian London 125 (Spring 2015). https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/1683770177?pq-origsite=summon.
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Hannah-Jones, Nikole. The 1619 Project – A New Origin Story. One World Publishing, 2021.
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McDonald, Forrest. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution. University of Kansas Press, 1985.
McDonald, Forrest. We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
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Morgan, Edmund Sears and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
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Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations. Boston: Printed by Manning and Loring, for E. Larkin, No. 47, Cornhill, 1805. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926 (accessed July 7, 2023). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0103461156/SABN?u=vic_liberty&sid=summon&xid=bca2660c&pg=1.
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